Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948 in Santiago, Chile; lives and works in New York, NY and Santiago, Chile) integrates practices of poetry, performance, painting, sculpture, film in response to pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago, she was exiled during the early 1970s after the violent military coup against President Salvador Allende. This sense of impermanence, and a desire to preserve and pay tribute to the indigenous history and culture of Chile, have characterized her work throughout her career.
While living in Chile during the mid-1960s, Vicuña began an ongoing series of small sculptures she calls precarios, spatial poems in which she combines feathers, stone, plastic, wood, wire, shells, cloth, and other human-made detritus. These tiny sculptures are often loosely fastened together with string, so the materials appear to have gathered naturally. These works are defined by their fragility and ephemerality: Vicuña initially composed the precarios along the ocean’s edge, so that they would inevitably be erased by the high tide. Around the same time, Vicuña became interested in ancient quipus—an Andean method of communication and record-keeping involving the knotting of colored strings. Her first spatial
weavings date from the early 1970s, and soon after she began to make her own Quipus. In the 90’s she began her monumental quipu from unspun wool. These ephemeral, site-specific installations combined the tactile ritual of weaving and spinning with assemblage, poetry, and performance. Vicuña’s surreal figurative paintings of the late 60’s and 1970s are more explicitly personal and political in comparison to her other bodies of work, and were created in direct response to colonialism in Chile. These paintings refer to the subtly subversive images made by 16 th-century indigenous artists in Latin America after the Spanish conquest, when they were forced to paint angels and saints for the Catholic church. In Vicuña’s paintings, religious icons are replaced by personal, political, and literary figures, commemorated and mythologized by the artist.